


Hinges

by laugh_a_latte



Series: Diner Boys! [3]
Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Depression, Diners, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 13:00:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20064421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laugh_a_latte/pseuds/laugh_a_latte
Summary: Jeremy told Michael once to call him if Michael ever felt like he does right now. But Michael can't do that, so he finds another way to think things through.





	Hinges

**Author's Note:**

> Please pay attention to the tags for this one! This is probably the heaviest I've gone on the suicidal thoughts, so if you could be triggered in any way, please do not read this fic. Your mental health is more important. Love y'all! <3

Michael seriously hates this feeling. Well, if this could even be called a feeling. Michael is not completely sure if feeling absolutely nothing counts as a feeling.

It has to, though. Because this nothing-feeling is cutting him so deeply, carving him out so wholly. So much so that he thinks he might as well _be_ nothing.

He might as well just stop being here at all. He thinks that might be nice.

Michael swallows, feeling his throat work. He feels his hands running over his face, and he feels them pulling at his hair. He feels all of these physical sensations. But it's like they're not quite there. They’re more like observations.

He pulls his hand away from his face and looks at a mark on his wrist, a mark he made to try to feel something (no such luck) and pokes at it with his thumb. And it hurts, but it’s almost like he’s watching someone else do this on someone else’s wrist. Like when you see someone fall painfully and you feel it, too. It’s like that, Michael thinks.

God, he’s so much of nothing that he can’t even acknowledge the pain he knows he should be feeling.

It might be nice to get away from this. It's funny, Michael thinks, how the feeling of literally nothing is overwhelming him. It doesn't make any sense, and yeah. It would be nice to stop it.

Jeremy told him one time, a while ago now, that if Michael ever felt like this he should call him. But, Michael doesn’t want to do that. Jeremy is probably busy right now, doing important things. Things like sleeping, or video games, or feeling, or existing.

Jeremy is very good at existing. He wasn’t for a while, and then the Squip happened and that really wasn’t good for Michael or Jeremy's existence. But now Jeremy is getting better at existing and Michael still isn’t.

He thought that maybe once Jeremy got better, he might, too. But it’s not happening. And Jeremy is getting better. So much, Michael thinks, that maybe Jeremy would be doing even better if Michael wasn’t there. He thinks maybe he’s holding Jeremy back, pulling him down with him.

He doesn’t want to hold Jeremy back or pull him down. He wants Jeremy to be better. Jeremy deserves to get better.

Michael’s vision gets a little blurry, which is really inconvenient because he’s not wearing his glasses, so his vision is already blurry.

Michael drops his hands back to his face to wipe his eyes so they won’t be so blurry like that. When he pulls his hands away next, they’re wet, which is weird because Michael doesn’t remember crying.

Michael stands up. He needs to figure this out, but his head is really fuzzy, and he isn’t quite sure how to do this. He looks around. 

It’s really messy in here, he thinks. His bed hasn’t been made for weeks and clothes litter the floor, along with bracelets and school shit and video games. His eyes land on a strip of fabric poking out from under his backpack. His Zelda lanyard. His keys are attached to that.

He toes over the stuff on his floor and picks it up.

Maybe he should go somewhere else to think about how to do this.

Michael jams on his glasses and thinks about his car. His P.T. Cruiser. He thinks he really does love that piece of shit car. With it’s dents and dings and missing muffler. It might be a Loser Car but it’s his Loser Car.

And Michael thinks about his Loser Car as he climbs the stairs and closes the basement door, lifting it a little off its hinges as he does so, so it doesn’t squeak too loudly. He read on some subreddit that lifting a door up as you move it prevents squeaking, so he does that now, even though it really doesn't work.

Then Michael thinks about why he still does that even though it doesn’t work as his shoves on the first pair of sneakers he sees. He thinks it might be like a placebo thing. Because doing something to fix a problem feels better than doing nothing, even if that action doesn’t actually help the situation.

Kind of like Jeremy taking the Squip. Kind of like him showing up at Jake’s party. Kind of like him leaving the house right now.

Maybe this is a common theme in humanity, Michael thinks as he opens the front door, lifting it off its hinges. The door squeaks anyways.

Or maybe it’s just a Michael thing. Because Michael really is trying to make things better, even if he keeps failing.

Michael falls into the driver seat. He pulls the front door closed softly. It’s very still and very silent in his Loser Car. He can’t hear the sound of the air conditioning, like he could in the basement, or the cicadas, like he could walking out here. It’s still and silent, just like him.

He lets it be like that for a little while, then he rubs his eyes and slides his keys into the ignition, disrupting the silence with a jingle and a roaring engine. His car is very loud where the muffler used to be.

Michael backs out of the driveway. He needs a thinking place. A good one.

When he’s with Jeremy, they go to the twenty-four-hour diner in town. Michael thinks he likes it there. It’s quiet, and warm. They have nice coffee.

Yeah. He'll go there to think this through.

~~~~~

Michael pushes the door to the diner, but it doesn’t budge. He glances over to the neon blinking open sign, confused. They are open, aren’t they. Michael looks down to where his hand is on the handle and—oh. It says pull, right there.

Michael pulls the door, but it only makes it about an inch or so before he freezes, staring at his arm.

God, he really wasn’t thinking when he left the house, was he? No, he wasn’t thinking at all, because he was going to wait until he got here to think, so he completely forgot to grab a hoodie, or long-sleeved shirt, or even a single bracelet, and his arms, normally carefully covered, are completely exposed.

And Michael waits for it to hit him. He waits for that anger with himself, or anxiety, or upset or anything at all to hit him, but nothing does. 

Michael blinks at his arms. And he almost can’t believe it because for the first time in probably ever, he really doesn’t give a shit. And he can't tell if that's like a good, improvement thing, or the exact opposite.

But it doesn't really matter, does it?

Michael pulls the door open.

The yellow lights inside wash over him, so different from the cold sky outside. Per usual, the waitress rolling silverware behind the counter smiles at him. Laura, if he’s remembering right. He smiles back.

“Hey,” she says. She looks over his shoulder, then back at him. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

“Oh,” God, why is Michael not even surprised. “Jeremy. He’s not, uhh,” and why is Michael still so bad at explaining this. “We’re just friends. Like. Best friends.” 

“Oh, sorry,” Laura just kind of gives him a once-over. “You two just seem really close.”

And for whatever reason, that just carves Michael out more. And somewhere in the hollow, Michael just feels sad. Maybe he should have called Jeremy.

“Yeah,” Michael says, taking a seat at the front counter.

“No, it’s really, like. It’s nice to see, you know?” She pulls a mug from under the counter and fills it from the stained carafe. “No room, right?”

Michael nods. She slides the mug in front of him, and Michael can’t help but feel a little good about that. How she remembered what he drinks. She didn’t have to do that. 

“Do you want to order yet, or wait a few minutes?”

Michael blinks and drags his eyes away from the bubbles in his coffee to look at her. She looks as tired as he does. “I think, um. Just the coffee, for now.”

She nods. Then her eyes narrow a little at him, but it’s gone so quickly that Michael probably just imagined it.

“Cool.”

She grabs a notepad and walks to a corner booth where two girls are sitting, probably in their mid or late twenties. Michael doesn’t know. He’s really bad with ages.

And Michael can’t help but wonder what anyone is doing here at whatever time it is in the morning, especially them. They look so out of place. Manicured with nice hair and just. What are they doing with their lives? He wishes they went somewhere nicer.

He looks away and back at his coffee. He traces the lip of the mug with his finger, one circle, before his picks the mug up and takes a sip. Watery and bitter and not very good and so hot it just misses burning his mouth. It's perfect. 

He cradles the mug in his hands and breathes. He lets the warmth seep into his fingertips and feels how he wants to scratch his wrist, but he doesn’t. He listens to the buzz of the lights and the faint sound of music in Spanish streaming in softly from the kitchen. He can just barely hear the voices of the girls in the corner. And it's a solid moment, he thinks. He tries to focus on just that.

He read online once that to cope with depression and anxiety and the feeling that you’re so small and worthless and nothing in this huge world and infinite universe also full of nothing, you should just focus on the current moment.

But as Michael sits here, focusing on focusing, he doesn’t understand how you’re supposed to do that.

Because he needs to think about what happens next. He needs to, because he has to figure out if he wants Next to happen for him at all. And if he decides to not have a Next, he doesn't have a lot of little moments left. But then again, he'll get to choose what those moments are.

He kind of likes that idea. Michael thinks that maybe he can live moment to moment if he knows exactly what those moments will be. If he doesn’t have to think about what comes after them.

Yeah, then maybe he could live moment to moment.

Michael shakes his head out and realizes his tracing circles on his mug again. God.

He should have called Jeremy. 

And he can feel someone watching him. Michael looks over and sees Laura the waitress, rolling silverware halfway down the counter. The girls in the corner are gone. The table is clean, too, like they were never even there. Laura smiles at him again, and he can’t quite smile back, so he just looks.

“Hey, how old are you?”

“Uh, seventeen?”

“Most seventeen year olds would be asleep right now,” she rolls her warm eyes at him.

“Or cramming for finals,” Michael says, able to pull a half smile, which is better than nothing. And maybe he really should be cramming for finals, but he’s not sure there’s a point in it. Depending. 

“That, too.” Her smile drops a little and she throws the box of silverware back under the counter, then she walks up to Michael, leaning on the counter beside him. Michael can smell her conditioner. She lowers her voice. “I know it’s like, none of my business, especially since I’m working right now but. Are you okay?”

Michael can't hold the smile, so he looks down at his mug, noticing that it's empty now. The ceramic's gone cold, too.

“Totally."

Michael can feel her gaze on his hands, where he's holding the mug. Then it moves just past them. Michael traces another circle.

And it seems like she wants to press. It's there, hanging in the air, but she doesn’t.

Instead she picks up the stained carafe and refills his mug. Michael looks back at her face as she focuses on that.

“Stay as long as you want, dude.”

And maybe, instead of thinking about if he wants a next or not, or if he should have called Jeremy, or the point in lifting a door off it's hinges when it’ll just squeak anyways, maybe instead he’ll just stay here, for as long as he wants, with Laura.

Yeah. He might do just that.

She stops pouring and looks back at him.

“Thank you,” Michael says.

And he really means it.

**Author's Note:**

> Geez I should write some fluff or something. Thanks for reading! I hope you guys like diner settings as much as I apparently do lol  
All feedback super appreciated! Love you guys! <3


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